For the people who are different, let me tell you that no one is “perfect”. Being different is better than being normal. You get tormented every day and get strange looks that make you feel so weak inside. You might even say “she doesn’t know what it’s like to be different”. Well I do. I have a stutter and there are others like me out there in this world who go through the same things I do. When I tell most people I stutter, they reply with “Oh it’s so cute!” or “Don’t worry I stutter sometimes too!”, but people who don’t stutter don’t have a good understanding on how it really feels to stutter the way a person diagnosed with stuttering feels.

Let me just clarify what stuttering really is. Stuttering affects the fluency of speech. It begins during childhood and, in some cases, lasts throughout life. The disorder is characterized by disruptions in the production of speech sounds, also called "disfluencies." A person with a stutter will repeat the same consonant like “K,” “G,” or “T”, but for me I stutter with a word that starts with “K”, “N”, “M”, and basically most of the alphabet. A person with stuttering may have difficulty uttering certain sounds or starting a sentence. You can most likely tell when someone is stuttering because they might (and I also), have physical changes like facial tics, lip tremors, eye blinking, and tension in the face and upper body. Other stutters and myself also can, have frustration when attempting to communicate, hesitation or pause before starting to speak, refusal to speak, insertion of extra sounds or words into sentences, such as “uh” or “um”, have tension in the voice, rearranging of a large sentence, and making long sounds with words, such as: “My name is KKKKKKKKaity”.

I am not the only person in this world who stutters though. More than 70 million people worldwide are stutterers, that's one in every 100. In the US, more than 3 million people stutter. Stuttering most likely will go away in childhood, but if you are one of the chosen ones like me, it will last you into adult hood. Stuttering isn’t “cute” to people who have it. People who have a stutter have undergone several difficulties in their life. The looks and the things that get said to you can just burn a whole in your self-confidence and make you never want to talk ever again. People who don’t have a stutter will never understand how it feels to not fluently say your name and where you are from. Standing up in front of a classroom, in front of people who don’t know you and don’t know why you talk the way you do scares the living hell out of someone who stutters. People with a speech problem like me will have troubles getting jobs. Most jobs require you to talk on the phone and talk to people. Those tasks people with a speech problem can handle it.

I personally have never met someone like me. I would love to one day meet someone who stutters but I doubt that will never happen. Being someone with an upfront disorder, I want to bring to the light that, just because someone has a speech problem or a physical birth defect that they can’t help doesn’t make us weird, or dumb. You might have a space in your teeth, or too much acne, or some other issue that makes you feel different, but it makes us special and I would rather be special any day than average. I hope that one day people can overlook differences and accept that we are all equal in the end and being different just makes us who we are. Being there and being nice to someone is all people really need. Happiness cures all.